Under foreign influence: Canada stands on digital guard for democratic elections

With a Canadian federal election less than three weeks away, the bots are out in force, looking for unsuspecting voters to sway.

Rampant and undetectable to the naked eye, foreign and domestic players use the pixels and shares of social media to shape what we think — and how we vote.

They use the same powerful tool that brings the same brand of shoes to your attention with every open browser.

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But to keep the sanctity of electoral sovereignty, it might be time to get a little tech savvy.

At the University of Alberta, P.B. Berge is an assistant professor of experimental gaming design. Her scholarly background includes social media and digitally-mediated political ventures in the U.S., and she vividly remembers the dawning of awareness of the impact of digital players on the election landscape.

“Following the election of Donald Trump for his first presidency in the United States, we were noticing really unusual patterns across social media that we later recognized as sophisticated intentional campaigns in order to manipulate algorithms on social media,” Berge said.

Almost a decade later, at the U of A, a handful of post-grad students are studying benefits and consequences of literally gaming the data science system.

On the bread crumb trail

Just because a Facebook post has a lot of “likes” doesn’t mean it’s true — or even that it’s popular.

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Russian or Chinese or Indian or American or even Canadian (or anyone else with “a horse in a race”) social media gamers all speak digital, and it takes them mere minutes to set up a bot account and unleash a string of viral posts on YouTube and TikTok.

One person creating hundreds thousands of fake social media accounts to “like” specific posts in a puppet-like string-pulling way can start a digital wildfire.

A bot posts a political meme. Very hungry interconnected algorithms connect to many other bot accounts, and if you click, “like” or even put a frown emoji on their post — engage with them at all — the invisible individual on the “back end” knows it.

“They know they’ve kind of got you on a hook, and now they’re going to have other bot accounts posting similar content and maybe tagging you, or use that to kind of shape the political information that they’re distributing. Over time with algorithmic social media, you might have a relative who has a completely different feed than you do, even if you’re looking at or seeing posts about the same big political event,” Berge said.

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“Astroturfing” uses virality to “bump” things in an algorithm to make sure lots of people see it, targeting specific demographics through ads or impersonating individual accounts on sites like Facebook to sow discord or disinformation or give undue social weight to an idea.

It’s an algorithmic pipeline.

“You’re not even seeing it. You’re not even necessarily engaging with these bot accounts yourself. You are just being led down the bread crumb trails that they created for you,” Berge said.

Feds on the case

Canada’s Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force (SITE TF) includes representatives from the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Global Affairs Canada (GAC), and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) in efforts to help safeguard Canadian federal elections.

The CSE’s Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (the Cyber Centre) gives political parties guidance  and monitors cyber incidents for Elections Canada, sniffing out foreign interference (FI)“detrimental to Canadian national interests and is clandestine, deceptive or involves a threat to a person,” seeking to “affect electoral outcomes and/or undermine public confidence in Canadian democratic institutions” on the down-low.

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“For certain foreign states, FI activities are part of their normal pattern of behaviour in Canada and often peak during election periods,” said a SITE-TF report issued about unsuccessful attempts by foreign actors to influence the outcome of 2024 federal by-elections in the ridings of Quebec’s LaSalle-Émard-Verdun and Manitoba’s Elmwood-Transcona.

Starting in September 2023, Hon. Marie-Josée Hogue headed Canada’s Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions.

While concluding Canada’s democratic institutions are still robust, she found a small number of isolated cases “where foreign interference may have had some impact on the outcome of a nomination contest or the result of an election in a given riding,” she was reassured by the minimal impact such efforts have had to date.

Candidates and officials who express views that diverge from an actor’s own interests prompt disinformation campaigns in an effort to affect policy choices and positions, Hogue said.

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It can also be a retaliatory tactic, “to punish decisions that run contrary to a state’s interests” or to stir up division in a democracy, the report said.

“Their aim is not to favor or harm a candidate, but rather to spread the idea that democracy does not work. The goal is to sow mistrust in our society. Russia is the prime example of this. Disinformation is difficult to detect and, above all, to counter since the technological means available evolve at breakneck speed. It is noxious, and it is powerful, it poses a major risk to Canadian democracy,” Hogue wrote in her executive summary.

“If we do not find ways of addressing it, misinformation and disinformation have the ability to distort our discourse, change our views, and shape our society,” she wrote.

On Dec. 9, 2022, Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) officials  warned Alberta’s resources, economy, and sizable ethnic communities made it a “very attractive” target to foreign powers to exert their influence, according to documents from Canada’s spy agency.

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“Canada and specifically Alberta are very attractive to many hostile foreign states due to our resource rich and developed high-tech economy; geostrategic interest, particularly with respect to energy production and the Arctic; and presence of large diaspora communities,” the notes stated.

Bots can undermine democracy

An assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the U of A, Darcie DeAngelo has worked in military wastelands in Cambodia, and researched genocide and mass atrocities, and researched poli-sci policy.

Foreign interference seeking to skew election outcomes is rampant in social media influence — global, insidious, and difficult to prevent, DeAngelo said, noting that in worst cases, social media bots can even foment violence against people going to polls, evoking fear among would-be voters.

Even if you don’t like what it’s saying, touching or passing along memes that hit you negatively increases their effectiveness.

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If you react, you engage the algorithm.

Memes. Shares. Attention — positive or negative — amplifies them.

Bots thrive on attention — even when you’re not aware of it.

“Whatever catches the attention of people, whether or not they’re horrified by it, whether or not they find it like funny, whether or not they are angry at it — that foments it being passed around.

“Internet users pick up on the one that is most outrageous, or the thing that stands out to the most people the most time, and then it gets forwarded, and then it gains in popularity through that,” DeAngelo said.

“Even if you’re against it and you engage with it and try to have a discussion with somebody who has an opinion that you disagree with, that causes more user engagement and moves it up further in the algorithm.”

Other bots may be merely functional rather than insidious, thriving day-to-day in the stock markets, where much of the up-and-down of trading is done automatically, in milliseconds, by buying-bots and selling-bots making algorithmic decisions based on computational decisions originating with data scientists trying to anticipate and understand the market, Berge said.

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While it may sound insidious, often it’s just a retail tool. Social media users have long grown used to seeing a brand of shoes popping up repeatedly.

Even a worthy charity may have its reasons for using bots in a changing non-profit climate.

Within the electoral system, bots can be in bounds in the quest for the hearts and minds of voters.

“If a political party here in Canada is rolling out targeted advertisements based on demographics through various social media platforms, we don’t call that election interference. We call that good marketing. We call that money well spent. And the line between those things does get very blurry,” Berge said.

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